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“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Jay Gatsby
“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
Jay Gatsby
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
Jay Gatsby
“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
Jay Gatsby
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Jay Gatsby
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
Jay Gatsby
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Jay Gatsby
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Jay Gatsby
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
Jay Gatsby
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.”
Jay Gatsby
“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
Jay Gatsby
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.
Jay Gatsby
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
Nick
“So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
Nick
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
Nick
“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
Nick
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
Nick
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
Nick
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and . . . then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Nick
“I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”
Nick
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
Nick
“‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’”
Nick
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
Nick
“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
Nick
“That’s my Middle West . . . the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark. . . . I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
Nick
“All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.”
Nick
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
Nick
“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
Nick
“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
Nick
“Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
Nick
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
Daisy
I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.
Daisy
"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now – isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once – but I loved you too."
Daisy
"Who wants to go to town?"
Daisy
“Don’t be Morbid. Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
Jordan
"And what's more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time."
Tom
"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out […] Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."
Tom
"What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car."
Tom
"Self-control!"
Tom
"I can't speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn't know Daisy then—and I'll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door. But all the rest of that's a God damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now."
Tom
“I won’t stand this! Oh, please let's get out."
Daisy
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
Jordan
“It takes two to make an accident.”
Jordan
"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,"
Jay Gatsby
"Don't believe everything you hear, Nick,"
Tom
"You're a rotten driver,"
Nick
"It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people."
Jordan
"Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!"
Myrtle
"Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!"
Myrtle
"O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!"
George
"God sees everything,"
George
"Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!"
Daisy
"Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down."
Myrtle
"It's a bitch,"
Tom
"I think it's cute, how much is it?”
Myrtle
"You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."
Jay Gatsby
"All right, old sport,"
Jay Gatsby
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
Wolfsheim
This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life...I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business
Wolfsheim
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Flashcard (75)